Portland's Hip Streets: A Paradigm In Progress? Or Lost?
( ... or "What ever happened to the yellow bicycles?"... )

Pleasant, shady vales, these. Long corridors of trees spread a leafy shade
along the length of a block-wide, four-block-long stretch of lawn, statues
and flowers. Along the street, art galleries, theatres, art supply shoppes
and modern and older but upscale apartments lie along this peaceful stretch
as light and shadow usher a walker along decorous avenue, up the hill to the
gates of Portland State University. Lovely spot is this, at Southwest Park
and Salmon. Quiet. On this Sunday, mid-30s couples dance to a CD player near
a statute of Teddy Roosevelt. Various groups, mostly older people, come and
go from artifact shops and galleries along the boulevard. No liquor stores.
Few food markets. It's sundappled and peaceful. Little traffic. Lovely for
walking. Some foot distance from the city's famous light rail transit
system, this Portland district represents the best in the inner core of
town. Quiet, sedate, and nestled into the low hills of downtown's
south-western edge, the neighbourhood could be a small town. That's a
Portland downtown signature: quiet little neighbourhoods, right in the
middle. We see Portland the progressive, at its leafy, shining best.

"Let's go to Portland for few days. We can stroll and shop. You can go wind
surfing up the Columbia gorge. We'll rendezvous for drinks and dinner
downtown, after you zoom back from The Dalles on the freeway." Folks from
Vancouver, Canada tend to look to Portland, partly because whenever Vancouver
civic debates turn to rapid transit, or urban development in lumber-reliant
cities, Portland becomes a rod with which local transit and low growth
proponents flog their adversaries. Clean, green, and not mean. That's what
the world needs. It's a Portland paradigm. The biggest town in a state
famous for masterful construction of a green and technology rich economy,
Portland is also home to liberalism so soft and bountiful that it makes even
left-wing Democrats blush. Canada's many socialist factions would probably
love to have their conventions here, were it politically correct to do so.
This is the town that once provided free yellow bikes for all to use and drop
off where they might. This burg gives green a chance, yet still seems to do
all the modern economic and financial things citizens expect. Third way; not
third world. That's the Portland we come to see and experience.

At the historic forks of the Williamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the
sine qua non of the Cascadian metropolis. Futurists once suggested the
western states and British Columbia and Alberta might create a country of
their own when Canada broke up and western alienation in the U.S. became
acute enough. Cascadia would develop a new age economy, based on natural
resources from rocks, trees and the water, combined with tonnes of high
technology to drive conservation, low emissions and lots of ecological good
deeds. It would be capitalism all dressed up in a politically correct,
recyclable suit. That talk is past, a wistfully irrelevant fragment of
impractical political dreams a decade ago, but still, Portland retains the
smell and feel of older, if slightly damp, bucolic dreams. Oregon stills
flogs logs. But with the correct attitude.

And so off we went, down Interstate 5's deadly daisy-chain, cheek to jowl with
thousands of trucks and cars hurtling north and south, east and west, and
every point between. Unremittingly dense traffic plunges to and fro from the
north edge of Seattle, without let-up into the inner tangle of road junctions
at Portland's edge. Hurdling along bumper to bumper at 110 klicks, or
alternately crawling along slightly closer at two klicks, we make our
knuckle-whitening way to the city-on-the-hill-by-the-rivers, a town founded
as an early 19th century anchor for American expansion into western British
and Spanish territory. Lewis and Clark and all that - the history of westward
ho is ubiquitous in and around the town. On Portland's edge, where I 5
gives way to the Interstate 405, we jump off into the quiet south-west edge
of downtown, and find our way to a hotel near the Willamette River, in the
heart of the green light districts of the inner city.

So here we stroll (stagger, in fact, after 6 hours glued to a car seat) about
a few hours later, our car tucked away in a hotel lot, in the downtown's
leafy sanctuary, the roar and tension of freeway traffic a dimming memory -
but off in the distance, beyond the bridges across the Williamette, we can
hear and see melee we left.

Heading further southward along the eastern edge of the university campus,
between 1st and 4th, and south of Market Street and North of Lincoln, a
walker comes across an urban landscape of park, apartments and business
buildings. Beautifully tended fountains, statuary, pathways, stairs and
greened and festooned alleyways, framed by sleek concrete, invite the
pedestrian through an eerily vacant track. One finds hardly a soul, except
for a few shabby men, hunkered down in a doorway, or a group of ragged youth
playing in a fountain, skateboards nearby. Where is everyone? Middle class
civilians, that is. We reach a hotel at the southern reach of this green and
shiny stretch, and turn north and east toward the Williamette River and its
commercial and apartment development at the Hawthorne Bridge area. Along the
way, we meet the occasional exemplar of local colour.

Not all is sunshine on green-dappled excursion. As so common elsewhere in
Portland's heart, the urban ghosts haunt the urban hollows. A few zoned-out
and ragged zombies wander among the languid activity, apparently refugees
from some other dimension entirely, poking their elbows into middle class
concourse only long enough to beg or make nuisances of themselves.

Bums are familiar in Portland. Camps of what modern parlance calls "street
people" or "homeless" play, disport , beg and occasionally bump up against
the tourists and earning locals in various areas of town. The bums are
harmless, one supposes, though would a person bet her life on it? In
Portland the gainfully underemployed gather in particularly large clumps at
the northern end of Tom McCall Waterfront park, a mile-long, grassed strip
running just south of the Hawthorne Bridge up to the Steel Bridge. They lie
on the grass edge of a large paved pedestrian and bike track that runs
between three bridges on the Williamette River's shore. It's pretty easy to
shrug and point out that most lovely spots harbour unlovely wildlife. And
Portland's spectres can be wild. Sometimes they yell at passing runners,
walkers and bikers. Occasionally they will take a run at a member of the
passing parade. Tolerance is queen here, though. Not a cop in sight. Are they
undercover? Writing parking tickets? Checking political correctness
elsewhere?

Speedboats spin by noisily along the river route, while parallel to the river
walk a steady stream of auto traffic winds its way between the road and rail
bridges along a tree-studded artery called Naito Parkway. At intervals the
parkway spins off to winding roads with access to the westerly bridges to
Interstate 5, or eastward along Interstate 405, skirting the city to the
west. The quiet core of city center is never far from suburban escape off to
the west and east. We turn into the heart of town, the center of center.

Pioneer Square, an amphitheatre-shaped area with an old courthouse at its
side, draws a large and polyglot group of individuals, including some who
play chess at a large stone bullet proof board at the edge of the square. The
shabby, scrounging ghosts of the river walk are here, too: "Hey, you dropped
something! Ha-ha." "Can you spare some change?" "Hi-ya doing, today?" The
square is a large amphitheatre. Tents and tables dot the scape on our day
there. Coffee shops, big retail stores, restaurants (with the so evitably
west-coast sour-syrupy microbrewery beer, big wine list and French-Italian
cooking) and specialized clothing outlets and pharmacies dominate the streets
in this stretch, from Burnside on the north to Salmon's treed and lawned
fringes on the south, and east to west from Naito Parkway to 11th, backing
onto Interstate 405. South, A giant health club dominates an entire two
storey block, with restaurants and a bakery sharing about a third of the
street level space. Northeast, an Irish pub and restaurant resides in an
ancient, refurbished retail building, across from a street level parking lot.
Curbside dining and drinking is not quite as common as one might expect.
Southeast, the gigantic Wells Fargo Center stands next to a new and old city
hall, to the Keller Auditorium, and to a convention center. Commerce and chic
play fine music together here.

Heading off east and west from Pioneer Square is MAX, the light rail transit
system crossing the river at the Steel Bridge north of the river park and to
the eastern suburbs. Pointing west from the Square, MAX traverses
Washington Park, then the zoo and heads on out to the suburbs. A decade ago,
downtown denizens could appropriate a yellow two-wheeler and pedal about,
then drop the simple, environmentally righteous device at a convenient stall.
They are gone. Some social engineering projects simply take on too sanguine
a set assumptions about human nature, I guess. However, other bright hopes
for humankind persist.

On Saturdays, a giant 60's style hippy market finds refuge on the northern
edges of the waterfront park, and under the Burnside Bridge. The food is
fast, modern and greasy. The merchandise, from candles, to jewelry, to signs
to soaps to handmade artifacts of every description, with the customary
dreadful "art" of every genre on earth (with a few from other planets) takes
a visitor back to, well, not to Woodstock, but certainly to substrata and
political mindset, and its fantasies and political biases.Here is Oregon's
green and liberal heart, pumping at exultant full tilt. More Cheap Crap than
New Age, actually. Still, the 60s was always more about having your heart the
right place, beyond all other sensibilities. Moreover, the dope goes down
better inhaled through a bong hand-carved by a third-world artisan who lives
close to owls, trees and whales.

Burnside Street itself is a dividing line for Portland: north lies industry,
torn-up streets and shabby shops that make up the Pearl District. On
Burnside's west-central edge lies Powell's, Portland's emblematic
block-square bookstore. It's all quite appropriate, of course: a hippy market
at one end of Burnside, on the water's edge and next to the ragged and raging
street people. West ten blocks lies a Powell's gigantic emporium, a monument
to literacy. Getting in touch with oneself, that's Portland's way. And, of
course, if that isn't enough self-exploration for you, then step up into the
porn shops just north of Burnside in the old, ramshackle remnants of
Chinatown that moulders there.

Portland's go-green, transit-focussed inner city (south of Burnside, at
least) has become a poster child for cities resisting high intensity transit
and car intrusions on inner cities. Proud as it should be, Oregon's big city
is still a work in progress. Free bicycles are gone. Many of the high tech
businesses have died or fled, leaving some of the leaf-framed, bicycle-pathed
office complexes to various ghosts and shabby street denizens. The New
Jerusalem is not yet. Still, Portland's quiet civility and relaxed opulence
will remain an attraction, and a paradigm for other, ruder places, such as a
Vancouver stampeding toward a MAX of its own, to be built through a public
park to accommodate an idiotic Olympics bid. For us, it's back northward on
the Interstate 5's corridors of bright lights and moving steel, thinking of
our Portland adventure as we grip our wheels. I still miss the yellow bikes.
They represent a tiny bit of lost hope, a wisp of memory of more golden
times. The other ghosts, I could do without.